Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the likely frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Each day as we make
our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take
an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows,
and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and
gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Just about every year, there is grumbling about this
category, and the complaints usually go something like this: The Academy Awards
are the prestige film awards the world over, they should honor the best the
film world has to offer, and under no circumstances should a film like Norbit end up anywhere near the Oscar
ceremony. This logic is flawed in so many ways, but it is a topic that comes up
all the time.

Yes, films such as Norbit,
The Lone Ranger, Click, and Jackass Presents:
Bad Grandpa can call themselves Academy Award nominated, and something like
The Nutty Professor (1996) can even
slap “Oscar winner” on the DVD cover if someone in the marketing department so
chooses, all thanks to this category. You know what? That is awesome.

I mentioned before how the cinematographers’ branch is
willing to look outside the box for nominees. Well, meet the poster child
branch for that idea. Prestige does not get an automatic pass. It is about the quality
of the work and nothing else, which is as it should be. Also, I like to think
about it this way: For every The Nutty
Professor, there is an Oscar for The Fly or An American Werewolf in London.
Sounds just fine to me.

In any event, no such complaints should be heard this year
as all three nominated films are critically well regarded successes of one kind
or another. Unlike many years in which there is a lone nominee in the category,
all of this year’s contenders popped up in at least one other category, suggesting
widespread love for each of them. The Academy tends to like old-age makeup, and
barring the kind of transformative creature effects of someone like Rick Baker,
they tend to reward the film with the most prestige that also features the most
makeup, which brings us to our frontrunner.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Though clearly well liked by the
Academy as a whole, this is a bit of a surprise nominee, given the more flashy
contenders such as Maleficent and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I that
were left on the sidelines. Still, now that it is on the shortlist, it is in
the driver’s seat for this award. It is the most nominated film of the bunch,
it is a Best Picture nominee, and the work is impeccable.

This is Frances Hannon’s first nomination, but partner Mark
Coulier is a previous winner in this category for helping turn Meryl Streep
into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
The old-age makeup on Tilda Swinton in this film is as transformative, if not
more so. Swinton is unrecognizable as Madame D., the elderly woman having an
affair with Ralph Fienne’s concierge M. Gustave. Her hair is huge, her skin is
sagging and wrinkled, and yet we never once question the reality of the
transformation.

In addition, Hannon and Coulier do much more subtle work
throughout the film, particularly on Fiennes and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling, a
hired thug with distinctively bad teeth. To me, as good as the work on Swinton
is, it is the Fiennes makeup that impresses most. He is an aesthete to his
core. There is neither a blemish on his skin nor a hair out of place on his
head. The makeup goes a long way toward creating the character Fiennes so well
embodies.

Guardians of the Galaxy – If the award were for most makeup,
this would win in a walk. Alas, it is not, but the makeup concocted by
Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White goes a long way toward grounding many
of the film’s more fantastical beings in a believable reality. Main characters
such as Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) can exist in this world
as a green woman and a blue man covered in tattoos, respectively, because the
universe they inhabit allows for it. Yianni-Georgiu and White’s work is partly
to thank for that.

According to the film’s star, Chris Pratt, Bautista’s makeup
took up to five hours daily to apply and another hour and a half to remove, a
process that included applying and removing 18 prosthetic tattoo pieces. The
effort shows up on screen as Drax appears as a fully formed character before he
even speaks a word, just judging by the lifetime of tattoos he has acquired.
For Gamora, the look of Saldana’s character is created almost entirely through
makeup, a tremendous commitment by both the actor and the crew to a project
that often as not is completed through CGI these days.

Foxcatcher – That nose. There is actually a ton of great,
subtle makeup and hairstyling work in this film, but I promise the only thing
anyone remembers is the prosthetic nose worn by Steve Carell as John du Pont.
If I am being honest – and I have no reason to lie to you fine folks – I found
the nose distracting. There is a great exchange in Ocean’s Thirteen in which Matt Damon, who is wearing a fake nose as
part of a con, defends his choice as “not just a prop for prop’s sake.” Carell’s
performance is too good to hide behind a fake nose. It is a prop for prop’s
sake.

The shame is that the rest of the makeup and hairstyling in
the film is incredible, from the cauliflower ears on wrestling brothers Mark
(Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) to the ghostly pallor of du
Pont’s skin. Makeup artists Bill Corso, a previous Oscar winner for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate
Events, and Dennis Liddiard do an amazing job of bringing three very real
people to the screen. It would be a disservice to their accomplishment to boil
it down to a big nose, but to be fair, it is a damn big nose.

The final analysis

Ultimately, any one of these three films could win, and each
would be deserving to one extent or another, but the overall support for Wes
Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel
will probably be enough to carry the day here. Guardians of the Galaxy is a definite challenger just based on the
sheer amount of effort that shows through on screen, and Foxcatcher is probably bringing up the rear, which is simply an
indication of the high quality on display in the category this year.